Building and viewing the documentation

The documentation you're currently viewing may not match the version of restic
you have installed. If you cloned the repository manually, you can find the
right documentation in the directory doc/. If you're viewing this online at
https://restic.readthedocs.io, there is a small menu at the bottom left of
this page, where you can select the version.

The restic documentation is built with MkDocs. After
installing it, you can edit and view the documentation locally by running:

Design Principles

Restic is a program that does backups right and was designed with the following
principles in mind:

Easy: Doing backups should be a frictionless process, otherwise you might be
tempted to skip it. Restic should be easy to configure and use, so that, in
the event of a data loss, you can just restore it. Likewise,
restoring data should not be complicated.

Fast: Backing up your data with restic should only be limited by your
network or hard disk bandwidth so that you can backup your files every day.
Nobody does backups if it takes too much time. Restoring backups should only
transfer data that is needed for the files that are to be restored, so that
this process is also fast.

Verifiable: Much more important than backup is restore, so restic enables
you to easily verify that all data can be restored.

Secure: Restic uses cryptography to guarantee confidentiality and integrity
of your data. The location the backup data is stored is assumed not to be a
trusted environment (e.g. a shared space where others like system
administrators are able to access your backups). Restic is built to secure
your data against such attackers.

Efficient: With the growth of data, additional snapshots should only take
the storage of the actual increment. Even more, duplicate data should be
de-duplicated before it is actually written to the storage back end to save
precious backup space.

Compatibility

Backward compatibility for backups is important so that our users are always
able to restore saved data. Therefore restic follows Semantic
Versioning to clearly define which versions are compatible.
The repository and data structures contained therein are considered the "Public
API" in the sense of Semantic Versioning. This goes for all released versions
of restic, this may not be the case for the master branch.

We guarantee backward compatibility of all repositories within one major version;
as long as we do not increment the major version, data can be read and restored.
We strive to be fully backward compatible to all prior versions.

Contribute and Documentation

Contributions are welcome! More information can be found in the document
CONTRIBUTING.md.

Contact

If you discover a bug, find something surprising or if you would like to
discuss or ask something, please open a github
issue. If you would like to chat
about restic, there is also the IRC channel #restic on irc.freenode.net.

Important: If you discover something that you believe to be a possible
critical security problem, please do not open a GitHub issue but send an
email directly to alexander@bumpern.de. If possible, please encrypt your email
using the following PGP key
(0x91A6868BD3F7A907):